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Totally agree, and would add another way “that’s what always happened in the past” is a terribly weak argument. Things might have always worked out at the societal level so far, but very often do not at the individual level. Countless successful craftsmen have had their livelihoods ruined by technological changes and spent their remaining years impoverished. How many people funding AI would be willing to throw their own life away for the good of some future strangers that may or may not be born? I'm pretty sure the answer is <=0.

Professional communication has a completely different goal than a student essay, and it's weird you conflate the two. A student paper is useless as an artifact, the actual value is for the student to learn how to write the paper. If a coworker sends me a long email for me to read it should provide some actual value.

I'm arguing against people who essentially say that running the LLM is useless; just send the prompt.. Obviously that is true if the person does zero additional value add, but then that person probably sucked as a colleague before LLMs anyway. When you use an LLM agent correctly you are adding value beyond just the prompt, and those three additional paragraphs won't just be extra noise. Especially if the agent is automatically fed your personal context.

An essay states a hypothesis and then uses first and second party sources to validate it. I'm not conflating anything, it's just a good abstract example of the type of knowledge synthesis work, which is why we make kids do them.

A business strategy proposal is nothing more than a specific type of essay where the research sources are internal research results, market trend analysis, etc.

A technical design doc is an essay about the best way to implement a feature.

An "executive summary" is just an abstract, and the MBR puts the latest research citations and raw results in bullet points.


> When you use an LLM agent correctly you are adding value beyond just the prompt, and those three additional paragraphs won't just be extra noise.

So send me the prompt and the three extra paragraphs that you wrote. The improved LLM will generate the additional context for me if I need it. But heck, maybe I wrote that context myself or have read it many times and don't need it parroted back to me.


A few tech companies managed to get massive numbers of people addicted to toxic social media content that was terrible for mental health but made a small group very wealthy. I don't think those same businesses and execs are just going to pack up and go home with an even more powerful content tool available now. LLMs are going to be used to create skinner boxes that make Facebook and Twitter seem like wholesome communities.

That stuff will help on the margins but won't fundamentally change anything as long as you have a growing number of people chasing after a limited number of high status purchases. There will always be a limited number of ivy league school openings, fancy hotels in Paris, and houses in the Hamptons. The only options are to participate in the same increasingly competitive rat race with your peers, or look for a different angle. Some people are fortunate to have interests outside the norm that they can pursue, but others will need to put in some more effort to explore and find what they actually like.

For upper middle class vacationers taking a trip through Paris, Barcelona, and other big name European cities to visit nice hotels and restaurants is probably the most stereotypical vacation possible. For some people that is their ideal trip, but the demand for those locations is off the charts. Given the thousands of alternative vacation spots out there, most people would have a much better time and save money going somewhere less obvious.


There's no specific "right" answer on the boxes. Like another post said they're looking at god-knows-what to decide whether or not to let you load the website.

Years ago I started to deliberately pick one or two wrong answers, or just not take the time to really look at them, and it made no discernible difference on how often I pass.


Sure, but in this case it seems spot on. China really does have a disturbingly high youth unemployment rate, along with a population that's aging and shrinking. I have no idea if they're headed for a major economic crash, but the track record of command economies controlled by a paranoid aging dictator don't have a very good track record.

For all the things China does well there are plenty of reasons for Chinese people to be concerned about their future.


Apple and Tesla are two companies that somehow have a widespread reputation for great UX that I think are absolutely atrocious in that area. It's not just 70 yearolds, an iphone is unusuable for someone of any age if they've never used one before and don't have someone to tell them how to do core actions like back or home.

Tesla loves to hide critical functionality in non-standard places, often buried in touch screen menus. They can move items at any time. That's insane to me, but I guess I'm the outlier.

Android's move to gestures is lame copycat behavior. I've actually seen people online defending it on the grounds that using gestures feels cooler. Maybe that explains it, many people will take UI gimmicks over solid usability.


Right, especially Tesla. The one thing I will say about Tesla's UI (not UX) is that for a while (and admittedly to this day, still, largely) it looked far better and pleasing than most auto UIs. But 1) others are catching up on that front, and 2) as you say, the UX is often garbage.

It's definitely varies by person. I'm much more like the GP where relearning how to do basic things I already know how to do is one of the absolute last things I want to spend my time on, but I know plenty of people who are the opposite. Newness and novelty are genuine features for some, and that's totally fine.

The annoying thing is that the latter group is over-represented in tech and a lot of core products like phones force people into that path. Most of the non-tech people I know couldn't care less about the latest iphone/android update,they just want the damn buttons to stay the same so they can do the stuff they were doing yesterday. But the only two phone platforms both change their UX regularly and users just have to go along with it.


It’s net positive when there’s useful new functionality, but phone software has been mostly a wash for a while now.

I am with you on UI updates, just moving things around and re-skinning the UI without useful functionality additions make me mad often. But then I grind my teeth and bear it.

Saying you need to physically take the car into them, unless you're in a country that requires them to provide the option, and disabling other features out of spite isn't what I would call a supported user privacy feature.

The real uptime being worse than reported is basically an iron law of status pages. You happened to hit one outage and I'm sure many others hit separate outages at different times that also weren't counted.

Sure. Difference is there are not many other services with uncounted hour long / multi-hour outages.

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